we had absolutely no idea what people
were going to do these things when we
started out matter of fact the two
people it was designed for was was in my
support because we couldn’t afford to
buy a computer kit on the market so we
liberated some parts from Hewlett
Packard and Atari and worked on a design
for about six months and decided that we
would build our own computer so we built
and once was up till 4:00 in the morning
for many moons and we got it working we
showed some of our friends it’s
immediately everybody wanted and it
turned out there took about 40 hours to
build one of these things and about
another 20 30 40 50 bucket and we had a
lot of friends at work that similar
companies who could liberate the parts
also every sterling of our time helping
our friends to build computers and it
was just getting to be a tremendous
drain on our lives so we got the idea
one day that we could make a printed
circuit board without the parts and it’s
le blank printed circuit boards to our
friends and probably cut the assembly
and debug time down to you know five ten
hours so woz SOLAS hp6
calculator and I sold my van we got
1,300 bucks together and we pay our
friend of ours who is this PC board
layout person thirteen hundred bucks to
do us a layout and decided we’d sell
printed circuit boards twice what it
costs to build them and hopefully recoup
our calculator and transportation
assembly today so that’s what we did and
I was out trying to peddle PC boards one
day and walked into a bike shop the
first bike shop in Mountain View and
Paul Terrell then owner of the bike shop
said he would like to take 50 of these
computers and I saw dollar signs in
front
and but he had one catch which was if he
wanted them fully assembled and tested
ready to go which is a new twist so we
spent the next five days on the phone at
distributors and convinced the
electronics parts distributors around
here to give us about $10,000 worth of
parts on thin air
this time enthusiasm so we got the parts
and we built 100 computers and we sold
50 of them for cash and 29 days paid off
the distributors and that’s how we got
started so we had 50 computers left over
while that meant we had to sell them so
then you started worrying about
marketing worrying about distribution
got on the phone of the other computer
stores around the country and gradually
the whole thing began to build momentum
and at that point in time we had some
feeling that we were on to something but
the feeling was so different than the
experience of actually seeing it happen
right now it’s entirely different and
sometimes a lot a lot of people ask what
did you know it was going to much go
into this phenomenon and you could say
yeah you know we planned it out we had
led on a piece of paper but different
than the experience of seeing 500 people
working at Apple computers but different
than the experience of seeing a
five-year-old kid who really understands
what he’s the tool that he’s got in
front
were going to do these things when we
started out matter of fact the two
people it was designed for was was in my
support because we couldn’t afford to
buy a computer kit on the market so we
liberated some parts from Hewlett
Packard and Atari and worked on a design
for about six months and decided that we
would build our own computer so we built
and once was up till 4:00 in the morning
for many moons and we got it working we
showed some of our friends it’s
immediately everybody wanted and it
turned out there took about 40 hours to
build one of these things and about
another 20 30 40 50 bucket and we had a
lot of friends at work that similar
companies who could liberate the parts
also every sterling of our time helping
our friends to build computers and it
was just getting to be a tremendous
drain on our lives so we got the idea
one day that we could make a printed
circuit board without the parts and it’s
le blank printed circuit boards to our
friends and probably cut the assembly
and debug time down to you know five ten
hours so woz SOLAS hp6
calculator and I sold my van we got
1,300 bucks together and we pay our
friend of ours who is this PC board
layout person thirteen hundred bucks to
do us a layout and decided we’d sell
printed circuit boards twice what it
costs to build them and hopefully recoup
our calculator and transportation
assembly today so that’s what we did and
I was out trying to peddle PC boards one
day and walked into a bike shop the
first bike shop in Mountain View and
Paul Terrell then owner of the bike shop
said he would like to take 50 of these
computers and I saw dollar signs in
front
and but he had one catch which was if he
wanted them fully assembled and tested
ready to go which is a new twist so we
spent the next five days on the phone at
distributors and convinced the
electronics parts distributors around
here to give us about $10,000 worth of
parts on thin air
this time enthusiasm so we got the parts
and we built 100 computers and we sold
50 of them for cash and 29 days paid off
the distributors and that’s how we got
started so we had 50 computers left over
while that meant we had to sell them so
then you started worrying about
marketing worrying about distribution
got on the phone of the other computer
stores around the country and gradually
the whole thing began to build momentum
and at that point in time we had some
feeling that we were on to something but
the feeling was so different than the
experience of actually seeing it happen
right now it’s entirely different and
sometimes a lot a lot of people ask what
did you know it was going to much go
into this phenomenon and you could say
yeah you know we planned it out we had
led on a piece of paper but different
than the experience of seeing 500 people
working at Apple computers but different
than the experience of seeing a
five-year-old kid who really understands
what he’s the tool that he’s got in
front
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